Apple’s upcoming iOS 18 is packed with tons of artificial-intelligence-powered capabilities. The new mobile OS can rewrite your text messages, summarize emails, and identify objects in photos. But one of the funnest features is the Image Playground, which generates cartoonlike drawings based on a text prompt.
While Apple has shown examples of its output during its keynotes, demos, and product videos, we haven’t seen a real example of an Image Playground character until now. Apple shared with WIRED the first example of Image Playground that it has shown outside of its pre-recorded keynotes and marketing materials.
This photo of an adorable little dog wearing a party hat and smiling behind a birthday cake is no ordinary puppy. Her name is Bailey, and she belongs to Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, who created the image for his wife in honor of Bailey’s recent birthday.
Federighi referred to the description during his interview with WIRED’s Lily Hay Newman about Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, the secure server environment the company is building to handle AI task requests that cannot be processed on a person’s device. consumer. Apple reps shared this later. It is WIRED’s policy to clearly identify any AI-generated images we publish, which is why you see the watermark on the image.
Image Playground debuts at a time when generative AI tools are creeping into software from all major tech companies, as Microsoft, Google, and Meta have released AI-powered software focused on productivity and creativity . While Apple’s approach to iOS 18 also prioritizes the practical side of AI, the company has included some purely fun apps as well—Image Playground is a prime example.
It exists as a stand-alone app, but you can also access it through Messages. To create a photo, you can type a description of what you want to see, choose a photo of someone from your photo library, or choose from several preloaded concepts. You can also opt between three styles: Illustration, Sketch, and Animation. The feature is not to be confused with Genmoji, which lets you generate custom emoji directly from the keyboard using text prompts.
Since none of these generative AI features are available in beta yet (although some other Apple Intelligence features are in the iOS 18.1 developer beta), the only examples we’ve seen of Image Playground’s and Gemoji’s output are strictly which is controlled by Apple. Until the features are released, Federighi’s adorable dog is the closest we’ll get to an example that exists beyond heavily produced and edited marketing materials. And I can say it’s pretty good, and certainly not as scary as the examples we saw at the WWDC keynote. Good job, Craig.
Update: September 11, 2024, at 7:33 pm EDT. This story has been amended to add Federighi’s dog’s name.
